1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a network transmission apparatus, a method, and a computer readable medium thereof, specifically, it relates to a heterogeneous network transmission apparatus, a method, and a computer readable medium thereof for simultaneously transmitting data through a plurality of network paths according to an assignment ratio.
2. Descriptions of the Related Art
Since portable electronic equipments are popular and various wireless communication technologies make progress, people frequently connect to the network through the portable electronic equipments. It is not hard to imagine that having a plurality of network interfaces for connecting to the Internet in an electronic apparatus is very common. In order to appropriately use the heterogeneous network interfaces on the electronic apparatus, a general way is to adopt the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP). The SCTP is a transport layer protocol defined by SIGTRAN of IETF in 2000. In contrast to the TCP and the UDP, the SCTP uses multi-homing to achieve the objective of controlling the heterogeneous network interfaces.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional heterogeneous network transmission system 1 using the SCTP, wherein a first transceiver 10 intends to transmit data to a second transceiver 11 through the internet 12. There are a first network interface 13, a second network interface 14 and a third network interface 15 which can be selected between the first transceiver 10 and the second transceiver 12. If the first network interface 13 is selected for data transmission, the whole data has to be transmitted through the first network interface 13. If the transmission through the first network interface 13 fails, the SCTP will control the first transceiver 10 to make two duplicates of the data to be transmitted simultaneously through the second network interface 14 and the third network interface 15.
In the conventional heterogeneous network transmission system 1, although the objective of using the heterogeneous network to transmit data between the first transceiver 10 and the second transceiver 11 is achieved, the whole data can only be transmitted through one network interface. This causes other unused network interfaces idle. As described above, even two copies of the data are transmitted simultaneously through two different network interfaces, each copy as a whole must be transmitted through one of the network interfaces. The resource utilization is not efficiently. On the other hand, since portable electronic apparatuses have limited battery capacity, power consumption has to be taken into account when transmission occurs. Consequently, how to select a power-saving network interface and to efficiently utilize the resources of different network interfaces is still an object for the industry to endeavor.